Wednesday, November the 5th, 2008

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Preoccupations

(Illustration.)

There is absolutely no reason to post a picture of the Busby Babes today, and I do so only to illustrate the following:

Dear Mr Key, writes P. Funnel, I have been reading (actually re-reading) my way through the Hooting Yard archives, and am struck by some of your preoccupations. There are things and people you regularly refer to which seem to have little or nothing in common, no overarching theme, as it were, yet you seem obsessed with them. A brief—but by no means complete—list would include:

The Munich Air Disaster; the Kennedy Assassination; Peter Maxwell Davies eating an accidentally-electrocuted whooper swan; the Hindenburg Disaster; Yoko Ono; Googie Withers; David Blunkett.

I realise that my selection includes two aerial disasters, so that is a common thread, but otherwise none of them seem to link up in any coherent way. Are there some profound psychological reasons that cause you to harp on about these subjects, or are you just repeating yourself? And whichever is the case, can you give any clues as to how one might predict whether or not an event or a person might become embedded in your brain, and thus crop up time and time again in Hooting Yard?

I suppose it would be polite of me to reply to these questions, so I will try at some point to frame a response, once I have finished making my set of Hazel Blears finger puppets.